See You in the Park, San Francisco

It’s already 70 degrees outside and the day's not even half over. The weather thingy on my computer says the high is gonna be 78 today but what the fuck does it know? In my experience here, anytime it’s predicted to be above 73 it invariably ends up being in the 80s. And there’s nothing worse than a gorgeous day in the Bay Area in the middle of the work week.

It’s demoralizing. Really nice days in San Francisco are our snow days. Granted, schools and businesses don’t close, but they might as well. Workers who are otherwise excellent and punctual suddenly come down with the kind of food poisoning that can only be cured by drinking beers in the park, going for a hike, driving to Bodega Bay, or actually, like for realisies, going to lay out on one of San Francisco’s beaches. I want to do all of the above right now. I just texted a friend who works in the Presidio that we should both play hooky and frolic out there in search of its famed pet cemetery. She has a better work ethic than I do, apparently, because she declined with multiple emoji sad faces.

But that’s just it: There just isn’t a sufficient combination of emoticons to properly express how we as San Franciscans absolutely lose our fucking minds when the weather turns this warm. When a city that’s renowned for its open mindedness and its disregard for rules gets what amounts to a moral get-out-of-jail-free card, it truly turns hedonistic. People stay out late drinking, smoking, and screwing even more than they normally do with an air of abandon that says, “This literally may not ever happen again.” And that’s how it really feels. We’re so used to layers of clothes and layers of fog that collectively, as community, as a city, as a county, we take up a single voice and say, “Fuck this. I’m going to the park.”

Yes, San Francisco, you are going to the park today, and guess what? Everybody is gonna be really good looking. While we gush about the millions of reasons why San Francisco is the best city in America, we often follow the sentence by muttering something to the extent of, “But people here just aren’t as good looking as they are in New York or L.A. or San Diego.” While that may or may not be the case, a large part of it is the fact that it’s perpetually autumn in San Francisco. You don’t even know what the person you’re dating’s knees look like until the first time you get them naked. It’s like Karl the Fog has somehow managed to make us adhere to Victorian stands of decency just because he facnies himself a history buff. But all that changes on days like today. Suddenly the hipster girls who dress like flirty grandmas show some skin and you realize they have nice figures under all that ill-fitting frumpery. The nerdy tech guys wear tank tops and you notice that all that time they spend in the gym after work is shamefully being obscured by the fact that they wear hoodies all year long.

And here I am, sitting in my sweltering room in my underwear, typing away on my computer, just trying to figure out a way to end this piece so I can, in fact, play hooky. Fuck emails, fuck writing, fuck worrying about paying my bills. Fuck scarfs, fuck sweaters, fuck having the chills. It’s beautiful outside and I need to take part in it. I just hope a cold front comes in soon so I can get back to work.